Lynn Abbey - Planeswalker

"Yes," Gix sighed. "Tell Urza that Gix has returned. Tell him the Thran are waiting for him."

Xantcha didn't understand. The Phyrexians had fought the Thran. Her mind swirled with echoes of Urza's lectures about Koilos and a noble race that sacrificed itself for Dominaria's future.

Gix laughed. All the raucous birds and chittering insects of summer couldn't have equaled the sound. "Did he tell you that? He knows better. He was there."

The statement made no sense. Urza had found his eyes at Koilos and through them, remembered the final battle between the Thran and the Phyrexians, but he hadn't been there. Gix was toying with her, feeding on her confusion and terror, waiting for her to make the mistake that would let him into her secret places.

"You have no secrets, Xantcha." More laughter. "I made the stone the brothers broke, and I made the brothers, too, and then I made you."

"Lies," Xantcha shot back and remembered standing beside a vat. A body floated below the surface: dark haired, angular, sexless ... her. "There were a thousand of us," she shot back.

"Seven thousand, and only one like you. I looked for you ... after."

After he escaped the Seventh Sphere? "I have my own heart."

"Yes. You have done well, Xantcha. Better than I hoped. I had plans for you. I still have them. Come back. Listen and obey!"

Gix pulled a string in Xantcha's mind. She felt herself begin to unravel. Newts had no importance. Newts did what they were told. Newts listened and obeyed. She belonged with Gix, to Gix, in Phyrexia, her home. Gix would take care of her. The demon was the center. She would do as he wished.

Urza's armor was in the way....

Xantcha was about to release the armor when she thought of Ratepe. Suddenly there was nothing else except his face, laughing, scowling, watching her as she walked across the Medran plaza with a purse of gold on her belt. The sensations lasted less than a heartbeat, then Gix was back, but Xantcha hadn't needed a whole heartbeat to retreat from the destructive folly she'd been about to commit.

"So, you found him," Gix said after he'd retreated from her mind. "Does he please you?"

The red light continued to shine in her eye. Gix would pull another string, and this time there'd be no Ratepe, son of Mideah, to surprise the demon. Ratepe had given Xantcha a second chance, but she had to seize it. And Xantcha did, diving to her left, toward the corridor. Something hard and heavy struck her back. It threw her forward. She skidded face-first along the floor-stones, surrounded by red light, but the armor held. Xantcha scrambled to her feet and ran for her life. Demons weren't accustomed to defiance. They had no reflex response to stop a newt's desperate escape. Gix chased her, but he didn't catch her before she reached the spiral stairway.

He howled and clawed the stones, but the passage was too tight, too narrow. A fireball engulfed Xantcha in an acid wind. She clung to the spine until it passed, then ran

again, through the corridor, the cloister and into Avohir's sanctuary.

Night had fallen on the plaza. Xantcha wasted no time asking herself where the day had gone. She released the armor, yawned out the sphere as soon as she dared, and headed up the coast to Russiore.

Urza and Xantcha 'walked away from Serra's realm not long after Xantcha gave him her heart. Xantcha was scarcely wiser about the imperfections of Serra's creation than she'd been when she'd walked into the palace, though it was clear that her presence, so close to the Cocoon, affected not only the realm as a whole but Sosinna's recovery from the Aegis bums. For Sosinna and Kenidiern, Xantcha would have accepted Serra's offer of transit to another, natural and inherently balanced world, but the offer was not made a second time. Urza accepted Serra's judgment. Even though he distrusted Xantcha as a Phyrexian, he'd been through too much with her to go on alone.

He held Xantcha in his arms for that first terrible step across the chasm that separated a willfully created plane from the natural multiverse. She held a sealed chest nearly filled with gifts from Lady Serra. The gifts included a miniature cocoon that was the perfect size for Xantcha's amber heart.

Their first natural world was a tiny, airless moon circling another world that appeared to be one vast blue- green ocean, though Urza said otherwise. He made a chamber beneath the moon's surface and filled it with breathable air, his usual course in a place where he could survive indefinitely but Xantcha could not.

"A terrible thing, this," he said, removing Xantcha's heart from the chest and placing it in a niche he had just finished. "I believe it contains everything they took away from you, even your soul."

Despite his incursion into Phyrexia, and Lady Serra's assertion that Xantcha wholly and entirely differed from any born man or woman, Urza wouldn't surrender his belief that she'd been stolen from her parents and abominably transformed by her Phyrexian captors. She no longer bothered arguing the point with him. It was reassuring to be treated as he had always treated her.

"I would destroy it, if I could find a way to return what it has taken. But that mystery does not solve itself easily, and I cannot devote my energies to it until I have determined the first plane of the Phyrexians and my vengeance has feasted on their entrails. You will understand that vengeance must come first."

Xantcha nodded unnecessarily. Urza had not asked her a question. His concentration did not extend beyond his own thoughts, and he didn't notice her head moving.

"Serra and I determined that the true number of natural planes in the multiverse cannot be counted, even by an immortal. If one started at the beginning, new planes would have emerged, and old planes would have disappeared before the count was concluded. This is not, however, an insurmountable problem, as we can be certain that the Phyrexians were not driven away from a freshly engendered

plane, and while it would be a tragedy if their keystone plane had succumbed to entropy and reorganization, we need not blame ourselves for the loss. Thus, it is only necessary that I start somewhere and proceed with great precision until I reach the end, which, with the multiverse, is also the beginning. Do you understand what this means?'

Xantcha nodded again, confident that Urza would continue explaining himself until her answer was truthful.

"Good. I will, of necessity, 'walk lightly. I had thought of creating my own plane, since such planes are always accessible across the chasm, but I would have to create a plane in which both you and I could thrive, and Serra told me that such a creation would be quite difficult to manage. Black essence, which is to say your essence, and white, which is mine, are deeply opposed to each other and virtually impossible to balance in the microcosm of a created plane. Now, I do not shirk challenges, but I must avenge my brother before I allow myself the pleasures of pure research, thus I have put creation out of my mind. I will make do with bolt-holes such as this, which I will forge and relocate as I have need of them. There is an element of proximity in the multiverse, and eventually one is within an easy 'walk of a particular plane.

"This should be an especial relief to you, Xantcha, since I will keep your heart in such a place where it cannot be lost or disturbed. It is also useful for me, since when I know where you are, I also know where your heart is, and contrariwise as well. And Serra has returned that crystal pendant I gave you while I was fleeing Phyrexia." He fished it out of one of the many boxes and draped it around Xantcha's neck. "You, I, and your heart and my pendant together make a single unit, a triangle, the strongest of angled structures. None of us can get lost."